Chasing Ivy (Oak Hill 1)

Not at all.

Chapter Twelve

Dawson

After seeing Ivy again for the first time in six years, I was feeling all sorts of fucked up shit. I was happy, and pissed, and then upset that we’d fought and even more upset when I realized I’d hurt her. I was painfully aware of the hurt I’d caused by the way her face looked. She was good at hiding her feelings but not from me. Even after all this time, I could tell she was hurt, plain as day. I recognized it by the way her mouth pinched just slightly and the way her eyes crinkled.

And that led to me aching, again, which just led to me being even more angry and confused. It was a vicious cycle.

When I got home that night, I expected Breanna to roll her eyes and scoff as soon as I entered the door. It was after eight, and she had come over at five to cook us dinner, which meant I was painfully late. Not that it would be a big surprise to her anyway, but now that we were trying this whole “boyfriend and girlfriend” thing, she would likely be pissed. But, I didn’t even give her a chance to mumble a “whatever.”

Instead, I pulled her up off the couch and slammed my lips onto her greedy ones. I buried myself so deep inside her, right there on my living room floor, that she couldn’t even form a sound. I told myself I was trying to make it up to her, but deep down, I knew I was being dishonest.

What I was trying to do, was to forget the entire day. I pushed away every wicked thought as I wrapped my hands around her waist and plunged into her warmness, working her body until it blissfully fell into a puddle of mush. I thought it would clear my head. I thought it would just take away every ounce of anger and pain that I felt after seeing Ivy, but it didn’t work.

I still thought of Ivy even with Breanna pinned beneath me.

It made me feel like shit. I felt so guilty afterward that I actually cuddled with her. We went to the bedroom, landing softly on the bed, and I traced lazy circles over her bare skin as she fell asleep curled up onto my chest. God, I was so fucking guilt-ridden. I mean, I highly doubted that thinking of another girl while boning your girlfriend was cheating, but it sure felt like it. If Breanna had known I was thinking of Ivy, she would fucking gut me.

I’m not even kidding.

Breanna was so insanely jealous of Ivy. She always had been, even in high school. I can still remember very clearly how she had gone after Ivy’s ex-boyfriend, Tyler, right after they’d broken up. Then, after Ivy had left and I was miserably pissed at the world, Breanna would constantly talk about how Ivy wasn’t worthy of me and try to pick me up. Everything she ever said about I

vy had been conniving and it always led me to believe that she was simply jealous.

It was understandable for her to be jealous of Ivy. Ivy was everything. Beautiful, smart, funny, nice, caring. She was the only girl who ever truly broke me and the funny thing was, we never even dated. We kissed, once, but it was enough to hook me – as stupid as that sounds.

I was truly messed up after she’d left.

She was my very best friend, the one person I loved more than I could even admit, and then she left and I was devastated.

Breanna was the first girl I’d hooked up with after Ivy. It was almost exactly a year after she’d left, and I was at the point of no return. I knew she wasn’t coming back. I was trying to move on and Breanna all but threw herself at me any chance she got, so I finally took the bait. We spent a few years sleeping together randomly when she’d come home from college, and we had this friends-with-benefits, no-strings-attached type of relationship until a couple months ago. We officially started to “date,” although nothing had really changed except for the fact that now we ate dinner together a few nights a week.

I sometimes thought I loved Breanna. I thought I had grown to love her because she helped me through a wicked heartbreak, but after just one tiny glimpse of Ivy at the office, I was thinking I may have been severely wrong.

Every feeling that Ivy had given me years ago festered and exploded right in front of my very eyes.

I was a shitty boyfriend.

And then the next day, after mindlessly fucking Breanna, all because I was flustered about Ivy, I grew even angrier about the situation. My fury intensified when I thought back to how I’d treated her just because of Ivy—the girl who’d left without any word, whatsoever.

Breanna might have been a little conniving and she might have made Ivy’s life a little rough in high school, but at least she never left me high and dry. She cared about me and that’s more than I could say about Ivy.

I was becoming more irritated by the second, so right after lunch I stood up from my desk and stalked over to the crappiest house on Burbank. I was prepared to hash it out with her, demand a reason as to why she’d just… left.

Then she dropped a fucking bomb on me.

Now I couldn’t even pretend that I was blistering with anger. I really hated that, because now all I felt was regret, and that’s way, way worse.

I wondered while walking back to the office, after seeing Ivy looking so extremely adorable in her stupid overalls and pink-tinted cheeks, what life would have been like if she hadn’t seen me with Breanna that day.

That’s another thing that pissed me off. It wasn’t like Breanna and I hooked up right after Ivy left. I waited. I waited for an entire year before finally letting some of my hope go. I couldn’t remember the exact moment that Ivy would have seen Breanna leaving my house, but it definitely wasn’t what she thought it was.

So what would have happened? Would we be together, today? Would our friendship have grown into something long-term? After kissing her that night, so long ago, I knew I wanted to have all of her. I didn’t just want her friendship, I wanted her to be mine and I wanted everyone to fucking know it.

My mind kept drifting back to the way Ivy looked, standing on her porch, explaining her side of the story. Explaining why she’d left, and how she didn’t want to burden me with her pain and sadness. Her posture told me that she was still hurting, and still festering over our lost friendship. I still meant something to her, and that did only one thing to me: it gave me the slightest bit of hope… and I had absolutely no business feeling something like that because I had a girlfriend.

Something I had to keep reminding myself over the last three days.